Rebooting Democracy – A Proposal
Brian Reich from iFOCOS started off the session “Rebooting Democracy” and shared with us how he arrived at the Miami International Airport recently and was struck by the more than 50 pieces of art about freedom and participation. In this connected age how we share information has changed, but has that brought about change? For example think of the many online petitions that are not heeded by anyone. We need more than technology which has made us lazy (it is too easy to send mass emails, tweets, SMS messages, or write blog posts) – we need commitment to make change happen. What is there, the question was proposed, about the new connected society that can be applied to government to make something happen?
Limor Schafman from Keystone Technologies talked about openness and the individual creativity and affecting change for issues that interests each of us. In this connected society full of people power we are a powerful distributed edge. Whereas before the approach was about the government broadcasting messages, it is increasingly about receiving as well as giving – a two way communication versus one. Overall, a lot of interesting ideas were proposed that seemed a bit academic compared to the other panels with more concrete ideas that has worked in the real world, but in the end we collectively came up with answers to the 5 proposed questions below.
(1) Business. How will we make money in the future, whether it’s next year or 20 years from now?
The world and the technology around us is changing rapidly – so it’s really anyone’s guess. What we as a group agreed on, however, is that for businesses to succeed they must be increasingly customer cantered and respond appropriately since it will be that much harder to get away with shoddy service in an increasingly connected society. Companies will also need to go beyond simply linking their mission with a social purpose and instead actively help make the change their customers want to see happen.
(2) Government. How will governments function in the future on a local level?
Making shared burdens and problems visible as aggregated data is necessary so that the government can figure out where the biggest problems are in the first place in order to properly allocate resources. The founders of SeeClickFix (winners of the We Media Pitch It competition) were present in the panel who had a ready solution to the problem – on their site you can report non-emergency issues that can be voted on so that the biggest problems in each neighbourhood bubble up and get peoples attention. The government, for their part, will need to listen to citizen ideas and innovate in order to stay relevant. We are all headed towards more transparency due to advances in information technology that make it difficult to hide problems from the public. But the question was raised – is it fair that we demand transparency from the government when businesses that compete with them are not expected to be equally forthcoming?
(3) Media. News outlets are struggling but bloggers aren’t necessarily changing the world either. What does the future of news look like?
Crowd-sourced news will just get bigger and bigger and there are already popular sites that let the community submit and rank articles that they think is most newsworthy. A big many online news sites use hybrid human machine filtering to create collections of news articles, but we must be mindful of the side effects for example the jobs people jobs because of so much automation. The answer, of course, is education – solutions are proposed in the next question.
(4) Social change. How do we train the next generation of change makers and what should schools and learning look like?
We cannot expect future leaders to effectively bring about change with the current poor global education in US schools. This must first be addressed if we want leaders who can empathise with everyone else in the world and understand the collective good. Literacy across platforms must also be emphasised so that workers can participate in future technologies versus simply training technicians for a particular technology that will become obsolete one day.
(5) Philanthropy. How do we fund and support future ideas?
Philanthropy can be defined in terms of dollars, time, expertise, rolodex, or materials (e.g. spare machines). But in order to have efficiency we must have transparency so that the best initiatives get funded. This will ensure that the most adaptable and innovative ideas get funded and survive, darwin style.
Sthapit lives in Kathmandu and is a graduate of Georgia Tech (B.S.), MIT (M.S.), and Berkeley (PhD) and maintains his personal blog at http://socialect.com/user/sthapit
